Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson slams Detroit water deal in State of the County address

By
John Turk, The Oakland Press

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Warning that water rates will double no matter what the outcome of talks for a regional water department run in Detroit, Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson said during his State of the County address Wednesday night that county officials have discussed creating their own water and sewer authority.

“Warning: The system is suffering from decades of neglect and will require billions in maintenance and EPA-conforming upgrades,” said Patterson, citing recent talks with the Detroit Water and Sewage Department, which could potentially control water and sewage in Oakland, Macomb and Wayne counties and be run by the city. “Believe it or not, in some places in the water system, wooden mains are still in use... Oakland County, as you might expect, is not satisfied with this prospect.”

Patterson addressed the regional talks, a grouping of new county programs — including improvement for healthcare services for Oakland’s homeless — and a recent New Yorker article that included more-than-colorful comments about Detroit Wednesday in front of a crowd of up to 500.

“As payers in this system, who had nothing to do with the corruption and the organizational failures of the Detroit Water and Sewerage system over the past decades, we are still going to be held responsible to pay for repairs to the infrastructure,” he said.

Coming off public grief Patterson took for negative comments about Detroit he said were out of context in a January New Yorker article, he said, again, that he was “sandbagged” by the author.

At one point in the article, which read as a profile of the often-blunt executive, Brooks is quoted as saying, “What we’re gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn.”

He said he regretted giving the author an interview, “... because it sets back my efforts to heal more than 30 years of strife between city and suburb — some real, some imagined. But I’m prepared to start anew because there is a wide range of important issues that Mike Duggan and I will need to address in moving this region forward.”

Patterson addressed a fairly new program, called the Oakland County Homeless Healthcare Collaboration, which is a group that has formed to establish programs that will provide assistance to the area’s homeless — which totaled 632 individuals on the street or in shelters in Oakland County last year, he said. According to Oakland Schools, there were 2,000 kids who were either couch hopping or living at a friend’s house in 2013, as well.

On the economic front, Patterson touted a reported $243 million surplus in 2013, a balanced budget through 2018, declining foreclosure rates — down to 2,800 in 2013 from 5,100 in 2012 — and 30,000 jobs created by 258 emerging sectors companies, among more indicators of a rebounding Oakland County.

His assessment of the county, he said: “Good and getting better!”

The Republican executive, who walked in to “Gonna Fly Now” — the theme song made popular by the “Rocky” movies — ended with a quote from Abraham Lincoln: “‘I do the very best I know how – the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.’ Well said, Mr. President.”